The languages of “Vikings”

“Although he’s a foreigner, he speaks our language, don’t you? […] I want to learn some of your language. Will you teach me, priest?”

 

This is a quote from the third episode of the first season of the TV show Vikings (History Channel). The main character, the Viking warrior Ragnar Lothbrok, talks to Athelstan, the polyglot priest he took from England as a slave. What impressed me about Vikings, among the rest, is how historically and linguistically accurate it is (as much as a non-documentary show like Vikings can be). At the beginning of the first episode, we hear people speaking in a language that is not English, the main language of the show. We are thus immediately introduced into an ancient world (we are in the Early Middle Ages), where warrior farmers and fisherman spoke Old Norse. Old Norse is a North Germanic language that used to be spoken in Scandinavia, approximately in the areas now occupied by Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. As shown in the series, the language used the runic script.

 

 

In order to make sure that the pronunciation was accurate, the creator of the series Michael Hirst, with the help of a group of linguists, looked at the phonetic traits of Icelandic, which, among the modern languages, is the closest to Old Norse.

During the first season, Ragnar organises the first of a long series of discovery voyages heading West, thanks to which he reaches Britain. This is where we encounter the second and the third old languages of the show: Latin and Old English. Latin, the language of the Romans, at that stage was a literary language and the official language of the church in several parts of Europe, and it is indeed in a monastery that we hear it for the first time. The language, however, was hardly ever spoken in everyday conversation. In the Early Middle Ages, Latin had already started splitting into the various Romance Languages (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and so on), and people were using local varieties as means of communication. In Britain, for example, the common tongue was generally Old English. Spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, by whose name it is also known, Old English is another German language, and belongs to the Western branch of the family. The language was initially written with Runes, but later the Latin script was adopted: the famous epic poem Beowulf, for example, is written in a variety of Old English. What we now call English, however, is the by-product of a massive process of “Frenchisation” of language and culture that Britain experienced during the centuries. For these reasons, modern English is significantly different from Old English, which actually sounded more like modern German.

In the third and fourth seasons of Vikings, Ragnar and his warriors move to the mainland Europe and try to conquer Paris. This is where we find the last dead language of the show. In Paris, as in other Northern territories of France, people spoke Old French, which, in spite of its Romance origins, at that stage sounded more like modern German than modern French. Old French, or Gallo-Romance, was later known by the name langue d’oil, opposed to the langue d’oc, or Occitan, which was spoken in the southern parts of France.

Interestingly, the show uses these languages (with English subtitles) especially when speakers of different idioms come into contact. In this way, not only can we appreciate the variety of sounds of the languages, but also the real linguistic difficulties that these peoples encountered when exploring other territories. Conveniently for the show, however, Ragnar has two interpreters: Athelstan, the priest who can speak Old English, Old Norse and Latin, and the wanderer Sinric, who speaks Old Norse and Old French, and who accompanies Ragnar to Paris.

On the top of that, part of Vikings soundtrack is composed by Wardruna, a musical project based in Bergen, Norway. The songs are inspired by Northern spiritualism and are played with old Nordic instruments. When they are not instrumental, they are sung in three languages: Norwegian, Old Norse and its ancestor, Proto Norse. Given that today is Winter solstice in the Southern hemisphere, I will conclude this post with a quote from one of Wardruna’s song, NaudiR, named after one of the Runes:

Hjarter hamrar
Røkkidimma døljer
det auge kan sjå
Og vegen eg følgjer
og dei spora eg trår
er kalde, så kalde

>>>The heart is hammering

The smoke is hiding

What the eye can see

And the path I am taking

And the tracks I tread

Is cold, so cold<<<

Crno i belo (Црно и бело) – Black and white Eurovisions

The title of this post is a song by Kaliopi, the singer that represented Macedonia at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012. The topic I’m going to explore this time, as you may already suspect, is the language use in the famous European song competition.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) has been organised since 1956, and it was initially developed on the model of Festival di Sanremo, the Italian music festival. All the countries of the continental Europe can participate with one song each, with generally one guest country from another continent. What is amazing about this competition is that it brings together countries, languages and cultures that, otherwise, would not be considered as part of similar traditions. ESC allows this and much more. People from Portugal to Azerbaijan, from Iceland to Malta listen to the same songs and vote for their favourite artists. In order to make sure that all countries have equal chances of winning, Europeans can vote for for three songs, with the exception of their own country’s artist (otherwise countries with larger population, such Russia, Germany or Turkey, would always win).

The first time I watched this show it was a summer evening of 2012. I was chatting with my mum about what was on TV for the evening, and we agreed on giving ESC a chance. It was revealing. On stage, that night, there was the Europe I know, with hundreds of identities and cultures, and with languages and geo-politics tightly entangled to one another. It was when I heard ‘Crno i belo’, though, that I understood the enormous potential of this competition. I had never heard Macedonian before, but in that moment I was doing my best to sing along. I wanted to know more, such as what the song was about, and why, at the time, there was a F.Y.R.O. before ‘Macedonia’ (which, by the way, means Former Yugoslav Republic Of). It was necessary only one song in a foreign language to trigger my curiosity. And that was also when I realised that ESC was not just a song contest, it was the embodiment of the remarkable diversity that we have, and that we too often forget about.

But does the Eurovision Song Contest really value our linguistic diversity?

Not so much, unfortunately. Especially if we look at the songs that made it to the finals in the period 2012-2016. Out of 26 finalist countries, in 2012 only 10 presented a song in a language other than English, 8 in 2013, 6 in 2014, and only 5 in 2015 and 2016. These numbers are definitely alarming. On one side, it is true that English is the official language of some of the participating countries, and it is also undeniable that English allows a larger audience to access the lyrics. On the other hand, though, native English speaking countries are definitely a minority in Europe, and the constant use of English as a lingua franca tends to suppress one of the biggest symbols of national identity: language. Even more, the artists are forced to sing in a language that is not their own, with sometimes disappointing results, particularly if we look at the reactions of the non-European English speaking audience.

The truth is that, when I hear a song from a country, I expect it to carry something authentic from that area. The sound, the melody, the instruments are surely important, but so is the language. When I see the name, the title and the nationality of the artist on screen, I hope to listen to something unexpected and unique, something that I will always be able to relate to that country. However, more often than not, I feel disappointed. The songs may be nice, for sure, but they lack of that national sparkle that they probably should have.

Not everything is lost, though. I am always pleased to see that there are countries that generally resist the urge to sing the whole song in English: among these there are Italy, Spain, France, and alternating Balkan and Eastern European countries such as Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Romania and Ukraine. Furthermore, if we look at the number of languages that have been used in ESC since its beginning, we find 61 idioms, basically one per year. The latest linguistic entry had its debut in this year’s winning song ‘1944’ by Jamala, who sang in English and Crimean Tatar. This is an encouraging result, but it is definitely not enough.

My dream would be to see every country presenting a song in their own language, not only to highlight their identity, but also to let other people know more about that idiom, how it sounds like, to what extent it is intelligible and so on. We should remember the song that Polina Gagarina (Russia) presented at the ESC last year:

We are the world’s people
Different yet we’re the same
We believe
We believe in a dream
[…]
When you hear our voices call
You won’t be lonely anymore
A million voices